updated 02:48 pm EST, Tue January 29, 2013

Office for Mac 14.3 available as standalone or as subscription

Following the release of Office 2013 earlier today, Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. In addition to resolving several outstanding bugs in the application, Office for Mac 2011 is now also available on a subscription basis in Microsoft's Office 365 offering. While Office for Mac 2011 still works with 10.5.8 or later, Office 365 Home Premium now requires OS X 10.6 or greater. The hard-drive based Office copy must be upgraded to 14.2.3 before application of the 14.3 patch.

Fixes integrated into the new version include repairing an issue that caused meeting invitation times from non-Exchange calendar servers to be off by one hour during certain times of the year; proper saving of hyperlinks with hash tags embedded in the URL; rectification of a crash in PowerPoint when the "paste special" option is used to copy and paste part of a table, and an issue where RTF text saved in PowerPoint for Windows can't be copied and pasted into PowerPoint for Mac has been resolved.

Subscriptions for Microsoft Office 365 begin at $100 per year for the Home Premium edition, and offer the advantage of no additional costs for upgrades (even major ones), along with free cloud storage of documents and other benefits. Student discounts are available and quite substantial, as low as $80 for four years.

How

Office365Service process spawned

I downloaded and installed the Office 2011 14.3.0 update for Mac, yesterday. Opening a MS Office application now spawns an active process (Office365Service) that does not shut down when the application is shut down. Before the update, that process was not present. What does this process do? Why can it only be shut down from Activity Monitor? Is there a way to disable this process from starting?